Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan
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With all that has happened since Covid-19 shook the world, there has never been a better time to ask the big questions. A time where we’ve found ourselves questioning who we are and what it means to be human…
MICHIGAN-MADE
When Covid-19 shook the world, our team rallied together to share a message. This message struck deep in our hearts because it was deep on everyone's heart. Our senses of identity were stripped as we all, worldwide, began asking ourselves what truly matters, what unites us, and what it means to be human when it appeared that could be taken away so easily. We wanted to share our answer to these questions through a visual journey depicting images of people who, themselves, had already asked this question and found an answer. Likely not such a clear answer like you'd expect though.
In order to abide by social distancing, we chose to film all of the scenes within MI, featuring landscapes and locations that were still accessible and beautiful despite the pandemic. We traveled as far as 10,000ft in the air to skydive, up to the Copper Harbor for fantastic views & waterfalls, and to the water levels of Lake Michigan to show the vast expanse of a body of water that's much more like an ocean than a lake. Here are some shots during production and some short promotional cuts that aired leading up to the release of this film...
THE ANSWER
So what was our answer to this existential question? Well, basically turning it back on itself. We have many similarities to all other mammals, we drastically are different from each other and yet we're all completely opposite of inanimate objects – so what unites us? At the end of the day, our answer to this question was that we are the only creatures on the planet, possibly in the universe, that're able to ask the question of what makes us unique. This quest for the answer is, ultimately, the answer in itself. There is no definite answer to be found except for the everyday decision to keep looking & experiencing the twists and the turns that are found along the way of the search.
Our journey telling this story, and its answers, was transformative for our team. Filming a project like this, together, during the covid-19 pandemic, brought our entire team together in a way that we never expected. That, combined with filming the individuals featured in the project, allowed our team to ask this question for ourselves and experience the journey that this film brought us on. Take a deeper look behind the scenes and see what it was like creating this passion project below...
We wanted this film to connect natively to as many hearts as possible around the world so, in order to ensure this would be possible, we reached out to our network around the globe and were able to get at-home recordings/translations of the film's script in 7 different languages (French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Filipino, Croatian and English, of course). Please enjoy watching this French translation and feel free to take a look at the others on our Vimeo channel.
